Essays on History and New Media

Below are links to essays devoted to the theoretical and practical aspects
of taking history into a digital format—many of them by people associated with
the Center for History and New Media. We would like to expand this list and
welcome suggestions of essays that might be added.

For Better or Worse? The Marriage of the Web and Classroom

T. Mills Kelly

This article was originally published in Journal
of the Association for History and Computing III, 2 (August 2000)
and is republished here with permission.

Introduction

When we think about the future of teaching history
at the college level, one thing we know for certain is that the
hypermedia revolution of the past decade is changing irrevocably
many of the ways we teach our students about the past.1
Recent surveys indicate not only how rapidly this transformation
is taking place, but also that historians are rushing at what is,
for us, an almost incredible pace to make the new technologies our
own.2 Almost
half of those responding to a 1998 survey by the American Association
for History and Computing indicated that they had already created
course sites on the web, eighty percent reported using technology
in teaching, and just under half require their students to use e-mail
for course purposes.3
Our students are in almost as much (if not more) of a hurry. Another
recent survey, this one of college students age 18-24, reported
that almost three-fourths go on-line at least once per day, up from
only half just one year ago. Of these "wired" students,
nearly forty percent reported having their own web pages.4
Such rapid changes in history teaching and student use of technology
are but one small part of a nationwide push to bring our educational
system into the digital age. Starting right at the top of the funding
pyramid, government and private agencies, as well as individual
educational institutions are throwing unprecedented amounts of money
at teachers at all levels, in hopes of bringing to fruition the
goal articulated so often by President Bill Clinton, of building
a "bridge to the twenty-first century...where computers are
as much a part of the classroom as blackboards."5

Too often, the discussion about how these new technologies
are changing what we teach and how our students learn takes on an
either/or quality that ultimately does not prove very helpful. Critics
such as Sven Birkerts and Neil Postman like to cast the consequences
of the hypermedia revolution in apocalyptic terms. For example,
Birkerts argues that hypermedia will forever change the relationship
between the historian and his or her audience: "As the circuit
supplants the printed page, and as more and more of our communications
involve us in network processes–which of their nature plant
us in a perpetual present–our perceptions of history will
inevitably alter."6
In Birkerts's view, this change will be for the worse, rather
than for the better, because he believes hypertext breaks down the
reader's capacity to think deeply about history7
On the other side of the coin, even the most academically rigorous
techno-enthusiasts such as George Landow and Jay David Bolter are
often given to optimistic pronouncements about how the web and its
associated technologies will lead our students to insights about
their classroom subjects unobtainable from good old-fashioned books.8

Historians attempting to find appropriate uses
for the new information technologies in their classrooms are thus
confronted with a theoretical literature that too often casts any
decision to use hypermedia as almost wholly positive or negative.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, for historians the picture
is a good deal less clear than it is for many of our colleagues.
At present, historians know very little about how our students learn
about the past at all, much less when we inject various media into
the learning process. To be sure, every historian who teaches has favorite readings or classroom exercises that seem to elicit higher
levels of learning from our students. However, what we do not yet
understand, in any systematic way, is how students acquire a deeper
understanding of the content we are attempting to pass on to them.
To date, only Samuel S. Wineburg has done in any depth research
on this particular question, and one of Wineburg's more instructive
conclusions is that historical thinking is a fundamentally "unnatural
act that actually goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think."9
If historical thinking is, as Wineburg argues, a fundamentally unnatural
act, then it is no surprise that our students have a difficult time
learning to manipulate historical evidence in sophisticated ways,
that is, to "think like historians."

Howard Gardner argues that we should not be surprised
that our students find it difficult to think in these ways because
their cognitive processes are limited by what he calls the "unschooled
mind." Gardner's argument rests on the premise that
as children we develop certain ways of thinking that become so firmly
ingrained that they are rarely shaken off in high school or college.10
In history classes, an excellent example of how the unschooled mind
operates is our students' unwavering devotion to presentism.
No matter how hard we try to convince them that unless they set
aside their presentism they will never gain a deeper understanding
of the past, they cling to it with an almost vice-like grip. Just
when we think we've beaten it out of them at last, we turn
our backs for one minute to write something on the board and it's
back, just as strong as ever. Wineburg argues that frustrating as
this experience might be, we should not be surprised because "We,
no less than the people we study, are historical beings. Trying to shed what we know to glimpse the 'real' past is like trying to
examine microbes with the naked eye: the very instruments we abandon
are the ones that enable us to see."11

Thus, given that historians do not know very much
about why or how our students actually "get it" in our
classes, it is challenging to assess just what influence the use
of hypermedia technology is actually having on their learning. My
own research project is a first attempt to get at this vexing question,
and, like most research projects that historians undertake, it began
with an innocent question. Several years ago I was teaching at Grinnell
College in Iowa and was fortunate enough to work with the great
Russian historian Dan Kaiser. Over coffee one day, Dan, who is also
quite enthusiastic about the possibilities posed by the use of hypermedia
for teaching history, asked me a question that changed my entire
outlook on what we are engaged in as we become one with information
technology. That simple question, seemingly so straightforward,
was how I knew that directing my students to my website, giving
them on-line access to primary sources, forcing them to do research
on the web, and even having them construct their own websites, was
changing for the better the way they learned about the past?12

Until that moment I had been so intent upon the
creation of my site, posting my on-line syllabi, scanning and marking
up texts, inserting useful URLs into assignments–in other
words, focused entirely on changing my pedagogy–that I had
given little thought to what these changes meant for my students'
learning. Badly afflicted with FDS (Field of Dreams Syndrome–"if
you build it, they will come"), I had lost sight of one of
the most essential goals of the teacher, namely, designing my courses in ways that improved student understanding, rather than simply
making the course more interesting, fun, or just easier to teach.13
Certainly, not all the blame can be laid at my own door because
my students were themselves partially guilty in this enterprise.
All the feedback I received from them was how much they loved what
I was doing with the web and how much they wished their other professors
were doing similar things. For example, in a recent end of semester
survey, 90% of the students in one of my courses reported that they
preferred a course taught using the web to one taught using print
sources. Certainly, student satisfaction is not the same thing as
student learning, but such resounding endorsements are difficult
to ignore altogether.

Research Model

With no body of theoretical or empirical research
which addresses the issue of how student learning in history courses
is changed by the interposition of hypermedia into the course, it
became necessary to begin to construct a research model that can
bring us closer to answers to this and other questions about what
goes on in the history classroom. The model used in this project
is informed by the scientific method, but like most classroom research
does not include the sorts of double-blinds and control groups available
to the cognitive psychologist. It is nonetheless capable of providing
the researcher with both rich opportunities for analysis and for
drawing properly qualified conclusions.14
To date most of the debate on either side of the question of how
hypermedia influence learning emphasizes hypertext (and images fed
to the screen along with that text), rather than hypermedia as a whole–sound and video files to go along with the text and
images–and until our campuses are sufficiently wired with
multimedia workstations, most of our research questions will have
to revolve around the more limited text/image delivery systems of
the web. The research described in this essay was limited to questions
about student use of hypertext and images because Texas Tech University
has limited capacity to deliver the full range of hypermedia to
students. Thus, in fairness to those students who do not own their
own computers (about 40% in my sample population) I cannot require
hypermedia assignments that use sound or video.

When it comes to student use of hypertext and images,
the web-enthusiasts argue that when students are confronted with
an intellectual problem, heading to the web opens up the possibility
of embarking on their own unmediated intellectual quest. In other
words, once they go surfing off into the distance, they are pursuing
answers to their questions rather than their instructor's,
and therefore are more likely to arrive at original insights into
the material under consideration. Those less enamored of the web
argue conversely that when students embark on this quest, the individual's
thinking is just as likely to become disorganized as he or she flits
from one hyperlink to another and that before long the student will
have forgotten the original question. Moreover, even if they can
stay focused on their task, students are just as likely to find
themselves at a site of dubious provenance and so may end up writing
a paper or answering a question in class with information that is
anything but reliable. If these arguments sound a bit familiar,
it is because one could simply substitute "library"
for "web" and find that with the proper skills our students can do very good work or that without those skills, they can find
themselves in real trouble.

Although it is certainly impossible to forge an
agreement among historians about what content students should learn
in any particular course, it is very possible to agree on a set
of competencies that students should acquire and develop as they
progress through our introductory courses.15
Among those that we tend to agree on are the ability to construct
essay arguments with the appropriate use of historical evidence,
to differentiate between fact and opinion and to be able to discern
the interrelationships between the two, to comprehend continuity
and change over time, to understand what historians do and the sorts
of questions they ask, and so on.16 Using
a variety of measures such as these, I evaluated student performance
in four sections of Western Civilization (the modern half) at Texas
Tech University during the 1999-2000 academic year. For several
years this course has been taught through a web site, but not as
a strictly on-line course. Students still meet with the instructor
weekly, but receive all of their learning resources (readings, images,
etc.) via the class website and use an on-line discussion forum.
In the fall semester a new version of the course and various survey
instruments were pilot tested and both sections of the course were
taught via the class website. In the spring semester one section
used the same website, but the students in the other section received
copies of all their learning resources (which were simply printed
from the website) and were blocked from the website.

Data Collection

Data were collected from students in a variety of ways–several surveys were administered at various points
in the semester, an outside evaluator visited each section of the
course at the mid-point of the semester to interview the students
without the instructor present, several students were selected from
each section for in-depth interviews after the semester ended, and
student essays provided valuable evidence of student learning (or
the lack thereof). In addition to the instructor's evaluation
of student performance, a panel of outside evaluators read randomly
selected student essays from each section and used a standard instrument
to evaluate each essay. These data make it possible to begin to
come to a clearer understanding of exactly how students actually
use the technology and what role the technology plays in their learning
about the past. This essay presents the essential conclusions from
the analysis of the data. All of those data, as well as samples
of the instruments used to collect it, narrative descriptions of
the research project and the course that was at its core, are all
available in the course portfolio created as part of the project.17
The portfolio site also includes commentary from those who have
visited the site and reviewed its data and conclusions, and so it
is a constantly evolving site.

Conclusions Regarding Student Learning

As the data from the project were analyzed, several
conclusions about student learning emerged. Good historians return
to the same pieces of evidence over and over again, considering
many possible meanings of their sources before finally committing
themselves to one interpretation. Therefore, we hope that our students
will learn this skill, not only because it is an example of what
we like to call "critical thinking," but also because
it is one very important way that they develop a stronger sense of the interrelatedness of historical evidence and of change over
time. Given the current debates about how the web influences student
learning, for good or ill, one question that this project addresses
was whether at later points in the semester students returned to
primary source documents assigned earlier in the semester, and if
so, how the results of that recursive reading were incorporated
into what the students wrote. Students in this course were asked
whether or not they had gone back to primary sources used earlier
in the semester and, as Table 1 indicates, approximately three-fourths
of those enrolled in the sections of the course taught through the
website said they had done so. By contrast, only twenty-five percent
of those enrolled in the print section of the course returned to
material assigned earlier in the semester as they worked on later
assignments. The final papers turned in by the students bear out
their answers in the surveys because the essays written by students
in the web sections reflect a fairly high level of recursiveness
and a stronger sense of the interconnectedness of historical events.
Not surprisingly given the survey data, the essays written by the
students in the print section displayed not only significantly less
use of earlier sources, but also a weaker grasp of historical causation.

In the interviews conducted with a selected sample
of the students in each class section, their work patterns were
explored in more detail and all students were asked why they did,
or did not, return to earlier sources as they prepared essays for
the final half of the semester. All of the students interviewed
from the webbed sections reported that because the documents they
looked at from earlier in the semester were "just a click
away," they were much more likely to use them. When asked if they would have done the same thing with documents supplied in
a course pack, all but one demurred, saying that, as one student
put it, "having all that paper to sort through" would
not be as immediate as a hyperlink. Or, as another student said
in her interview, the web "is just easier to use than a book."
Students from the print section were more instrumental in their
descriptions of how they prepared their final essays, describing
a process whereby they relied on the source documents that most
obviously related to the assignment at hand. When asked why they
did not go back to earlier documents, these students typically responded
that it did not seem necessary, and so simply had not done so.

Two conclusions arise from these findings about
student recursiveness. The first of these is that the ease of access
students have when their source documents are made available on
a web site does encourage and facilitate the quality of recursiveness
that we try to instill in our students in ways that having the exact
same documents provided in a course pack does not. Access alone,
however, is not the answer. Students saw the links imbedded in the
documents as both permission and encouragement from the instructor
to return to earlier sources and thus, in a very real sense, began
to view all of the sources connected via hyperlinks as some sort
of larger (hyper)text. Thus, it is easily possible to imagine how
course and assignment design would trump technology when it comes
to facilitating recursive reading of sources. However, a larger
consideration is which of the links students chose to follow, because
it was these choices that helped dictate the final analysis they
reflected back in their essays. An intricately interlinked set of
primary source documents makes it possible for students to construct print alone, no matter how well designed, cannot, except for the
most gifted or motivated learners. Thus, from this finding it is
likely that students encountering sources via the web will experience
an increased awareness of continuity and change over time as they
attempt to make connections between the sources they read earlier
in the semester and those they are working with toward the end of
the term.

By contrast to their active use of the primary
source documents assigned during the semester, students in all four
sections of the course hardly used the textbook at all. Because
the course is not based on the coverage model of the introductory
history survey, and instead is built around interrelated thematic
modules, the course does not emphasize the acquisition by students
of as much of the standard narrative of western civilization as
is often the case. For this reason, students were encouraged to
use the textbook as a resource rather than as the foundation upon
which their learning would be built, and so it is not surprising
that the textbook was not heavily used. Further, two structural
aspects of the course facilitated their avoidance of the textbook–grading
was based on essays and participation and so there were no examinations,
and all of their assignments (writing, preparation for discussion)
emphasized the primary source documents. However, when asked why
they did not make much use of the textbook, the students interviewed
from the web sections did not make reference to any of these characteristics
of the course, instead saying that they found what they needed via
the website and so felt little need to consult the textbook. When
they did feel such a need, they typically looked for answers on
the web rather than cracking their text.

Students from the print section gave similar answers
to these same questions, with the exception that when they needed
to know more they typically turned to the library rather than the
web for answers. When pressed as to why they did not simply open
their textbook, which might seem an obvious place to begin such
a search, all of the students expressed dissatisfaction with the
textbook because, as one student put it, the textbook was "heavily factual" and so did not help you understand what had "really
happened." Now, while an instructor might be pleased with
the fact that students who felt this way wanted to spend more time
with the primary sources, not surprisingly, many of these same students
also were unable, or at least had real difficulty, setting the primary
sources they were reading in the appropriate historical context.
Thus, while providing students with primary source documents in
a format (on the web) they find easy and enjoyable encourages them
to spend more time with the primary sources, unless those sources
are presented in a way that also makes it possible for students
to set them in their appropriate historical context, then some of
Birkerts' predictions may well come true for the inexperienced
student reader.

A second question that I was very interested in
answering was whether or not my students left the class website
and the links it includes to go poking around on the web. After
all, if no one actually embarked on that unmediated intellectual
quest, much of the potential of the web would remain just that,
potential. Only half of the students in the web sections reported
having gone beyond the links I provided for them on the website
and the vast majority of those who did leave my site did so while
working on the last two assignments of the semester. These two assignments
were the only two where I specifically directed students to start
their research at an archive site (the website for the Holocaust
Museum in Washington, D.C. or the Marx-Engels Internet Archive)
rather than with a list of links I provided.19
Once they got to these meta-sites, they typically followed links that led them to a variety of different sources out on the web.
In my interviewing, I asked the students why it was only these assignments
that led them off on their own and all who did some exploring answered
one of two ways: either they were not sure "what you were
looking for" and so had to find answers to their own questions;
or they simply felt empowered/liberated by the non-specific nature
of the assignment to go forth and find. As one young woman put it,
"It helped me to learn what I found interesting." In
only a few rare cases did students report going beyond my site for
resources on assignments other than these two. My own evaluation
of the essays written by students in response to these final two
assignments is that as a group they demonstrate a somewhat higher
level of originality, especially when it comes to weaving together
a variety of primary and secondary sources. Of course, one would
expect (or at least hope) that later in the semester students would
be better historians than they were at the beginning. However, it
also seems, based upon the various evaluations of student writing
samples, that as a group those students who went beyond the course
site (or course pack) generally did measurably better work.

Conclusions

What then are we to conclude from my initial findings
in this project? On the positive side of the ledger, using the web
certainly encourages students to focus on primary sources, especially
what they mean and how they relate to one another, rather than simply
memorizing some fact about them. Of particular benefit in this regard
is that having the sources available to them on a website facilitates
recursive reading of those sources, with the benefits discussed does seem to encourage original thinking about the past, thereby
helping students to make more sophisticated connections between
various sources, events and people than they generally do with a
textbook or monograph. When the full potential of hypermedia becomes
available to the majority of students, we can expect that their
explorations will result in even more interesting conclusions on
their part.

On the less positive side of the ledger, one thing
that is very clear from my research is that students, even the very
best students, not only do not know how to judge the quality of
what they find on the web (despite having gone through an exercise
aimed at developing this skill), they do not even think much about
the potential risks of bogus, or simply sloppy, websites. We should
expect that with each passing semester our students will privilege
information they find on the web over what they find in books, so
unless we teach them, right at the beginning of their academic careers,
how to judge the quality of a website, we are doing them a grave
disservice.20
Another obvious problem that we are all aware of and my findings
simply bear out, is that the web discourages our students from using
the library, or even books at all. If they can find what they want
on the web, they tend to stop there. Of course, this finding does
not mean the end of the library as we know it, but rather, points
to the need to teach our students how to combine the resources they
prefer (on the web) with those in the library. A course such as
the one I delivered this past year actually discourages them from
using the library and therefore helped set them up for trouble later
on in their academic careers when they must use the library for research.

In addition to these several implications for the
future, one other that arises from the results of this project is
that while the hypermedia revolution does not herald the end of
the book, I believe it does herald the end of the coverage model
introductory history survey course. Because the web encourages recursiveness
and self-directed research, our students will become increasingly
impatient with the traditional model of the introductory history
survey. If we continue to charge them with making sense of the western
past from Plato to NATO in just twenty-eight weeks, they are going
to become increasingly frustrated with us and our courses. The careful
consideration of topics and underlying sources that hypermedia encourages
is simply not possible if one covers the French Revolution on Monday,
Napoleon on Wednesday, and Congress Europe on Friday. Therefore,
I believe that in the not too distant future, the coverage model
survey course as we know it today will disappear completely from
our curricula.

Footnotes:

1
The project described in this paper has been made possible by the
generous support of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching and also of Texas Tech University. I would also like to thank
my colleagues in the Carnegie Scholars program, most of whom contributed
in important ways to shaping my thinking about this project.

2
A useful overview of how the historical profession itself is being
changed by the new technologies is Stanley N. Katz, "A Computer
is Not a Typewriter, or Getting Right with Information Technology
in the Humanities," Lecture in the Digital Directions Speakers
Series, University of Virginia, 4 February 1999. www.wws.princeton.edu/~snkatz/papers/uvatlk.html

3
Dennis Trinkle, "History and the Computer Revolutions. A Survey
of Current Practices," Journal of
the Association for History and Computing, II/1, April
1999, p. 2.

6
Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies. The Fate of Reading in an
Electronic Age, (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994), pp. 3-4.
Among Postman's many works dealing with these questions, his
The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, (New
York: Vintage Books, 1996) is probably the best example.

13
On the use of hypermedia in undergraduate history classes, see the
entire February 1998 and February 1999 issues of Perspectives. Particularly relevant for this paper are: Charles T. Evans and Robert
Brown, "Teaching the History Survey Course using Multimedia
Techniques," Perspectives,
February 1998, www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues/1998/9802/9802TEC.CFM;
and Patricia Seed, "Teaching History With the Web: Two Approaches,"
Perspectives, February 1998,
www.theaha.org/perspectives/issues/1998/9802/9802TEC2.CFM.
On teaching for understanding, see Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe,
Understanding by Design, (Alexandria,
Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development,
1998).

14
On classroom research and how it differs from conventional educational
research, see K. Patricia Cross, "Classroom Research: Implementing
the Scholarship of Teaching," New Directions for Teaching
and Learning, 75, 1998.

15
Two essays which consider the history of this question are Gilbert
Allerdyce, "The Rise and Fall of the Western Civilization Course,"
American Historical Review 87, (June 1982): 695-725 and Daniel
A Siegal, "'Western Civ and the Staging of History in
American Higher Education," American Historical Review,
105, (June 2000): 770-805.

16
This particular list of competencies comes from a longer list
in use at Temple University. For another view of competencies that
students should acquire in an introductory history course, see Tim
Keirn, "Starting Small: The Creation of a Year Fourteen History
Standard," Organization of American Historians Newsletter,
(November 1999), pp. 9-10. Thanks to Bill Cutler of Temple University
for calling my attention to both his department's approach to
competencies and to the Keirn article.

17
On the differences between course portfolios and teaching portfolios,
see Pat Hutchings, ed., The Course Portfolio, (Washington:
AAHE, 1998).

18
The response rate to these end of semester surveys was just over 80%.